Bohemian Rhapsody—the troubled new production starring Rami Malek as the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in his first leading, big-screen role—is barely watchable. Not because it’s so thoroughly bad that I couldn’t watch, but rather because of how bad it made me feel. For all that Freddie Mercury did for us—for all that his spirit-lifting rocket engine of a voice gave us—the movie fashions his life into a mock-glamorous, emptily pompous tragedy, when, if anything, it was a romance. Whatever the actual subjects of their music, every great Queen song—from “We Are the Champions” to “Fat Bottomed Girls”—is about falling in love with its makers, feeling like a member of that collective love, participating in it, singing along with it, being in on it. Their songs are about Mercury’s voice—to say nothing of being about the “What the fuck?”-ness of their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink musical arrangements. All that Bohemian Rhapsody has going for it, meanwhile, is the “What the fuck?”

Oh, well. This happens. The film has had a notably rough road to the screen. At the announcement of its development, Sacha Baron Cohen had been cast as Mercury. The exceptionally talented Malek took over as pre-production lagged. Then original director Bryan Singer suddenly departed the film mid-production in a row over competing visions for the film. Dexter Fletcher, uncredited, completed the movie. I don’t think any of that quite explains what makes Bohemian Rhapsody such a bummer. That’s attributable less to the movie’s making than to its intentions.

Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of one Farrokh Bulsara, a Tanzania-born boy prone to calling people “darling” from a young age, whose family relocated from their war-torn homeland of Zanzibar to Middlesex, London. Farrokh becomes Freddie; he joins Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), whom he meets outside of a club performance after their lead singer quits; a year later, John Deacon (Joe Mazzello), a drummer, joins them. Freddie meets a woman, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), with whom he has a relationship. Then he meets a man, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech)—protégé to the band’s early manager John Reid (Aidan Gillen)—whose influence over him would reshape the course of the entire band, including Mercury’s estrangement from it. At some point, he contracts HIV—early in the history of the disease—and it advances to AIDS. And on and on. Bohemian Rhapsody hits all the notes you’d expect of a wide-ranging musical biopic, but relishes very little of them—save the band’s actually iconic Live Aid performance in 1985. All roads, the film says, lead to Wembley Stadium.

The movie’s haphazard direction seems to be the main culprit—but the writing doesn't help. Mercury’s queerness is flattened into the boring same old: flashy parties full of drug-addled, punkish twinks on the one hand; quick nods to anonymous, offscreen sex in subterranean clubs and cruising spots on the other. When he’s diagnosed with AIDS late in the film, the movie sets you up to think, “Well, of course—look at how he lived.” And much of the narrative is predicated on that uneasy truth. Because Mercury’s sex life was (apparently) unknown to his bandmates, the film’s logic seems to go, it is beyond the scope of the movie.

Never mind the men Mercury met in these spaces, the interactions he had, the things he learned about himself and others—maybe even musically! Never mind the fact that queerness and gay sex amount to more than the shadowy explanation for his death, that these things were also a substantial part of his life. The film still finds time for polite gay romance, mind you—just not for the real substance of the relationships Mercury had with men, including, of course, sex. Mercury may have been closeted to some of the people closest to him. But the movie conflates this with being closeted to oneself. Worse, it wields it all in the name of a tragic arc that takes the specificity of Mercury’s identity for granted. He may have been a rock legend, but he was foremost a man.

And in that regard, the movie fails him. We’re all a little spoiled by heroic feats of verisimilitude in films like these—Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles comes to mind—but realistic-ness isn’t quite the issue here: the ideas behind Mercury’s portrayal are. Take, for example, those chompers. Mercury was blessed with four additional incisors. “More space in my mouth means more range,” Malek’s Mercury says to his future bandmates when they first meet—a cruise-y pickup if I’ve ever heard one. A gay man, hearing the line, knows it’s opportune for a genuine sense of playfulness or sexual mischief. But Malek drains it of that extra spark. He says it as he strolls away, full of big-toothed, artificial confidence at having gotten in a clever line—selling short what made it so delicious in the first place.

Bohemian Rhapsody’s problems aren’t specific to this movie. They are the bane of biopics broadly speaking, especially those tackling artists. I want to leave this kind of movie with a sense of the artist’s art, not just of the headlined subsections of a Wikipedia summary. The movie only has something to offer, in that regard, when Mercury is in front of a crowd. The camera pivots and flails around Malek during Queen’s performance scenes—the film is shrewdly attentive to building up Mercury’s myth as the consummate frontman, a singing fireball holding court every time he walked onstage.

But the film still doesn’t quite know how to capture or contain that energy, so it all just sort of goes splat on-screen. It’s haphazard, and it somehow just barely works. Malek, though he struggles elsewhere, really puts his back into it in these scenes, prancing across the stage with wiry athleticism, flirting his way into the audience’s affections song by song. I almost wished most of the backstage drama and psychological portraiture had been excised in favor of more music. These performance scenes are by far the film’s most revealing. None of the film’s drama compares.

The finale, that big swooping, Live Aid kiss-off, is ample proof of that. It’s probably the best thing Bohemian Rhapsody has going for it, and even then, the film is overly fussy with contrived drama. You’d think, until a closing title card corrects the impression, that Live Aid is the last thing Mercury did before he died. In fact, he would go on performing for some years, and would even be happily partnered. That part’s saved for the margins, however, and the end credits—just like so much of what made him so brash, intoxicating, daring. This movie may intend to be his life story. But his life, it seems, is what’s just beyond the movie.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the relationship between Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Say what you will about her performance as Padmé Amidala (and sure, people—Portman included—have said a lot), but how can you not include her Star Wars debut in a rundown of her most memorable roles?

From Everett Collection.

Closer

With a pink wig and lines like “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off,” Portman nailed the part of “Alice,” an inscrutable stripper. The performance earned her her first Oscar nod.

My Blueberry Nights

Saturday Night Live

A quick TV exception: Portman lampooned her public image as a picture-perfect Harvard grad with this instant-classic S.N.L. short, rapping about cheating, snorting coke, and smoking pot every day in college. There was an equally insane sequel in 2018.

Paris, Je T’aime

In this series of vignettes, Portman plays an American in Paris who falls in love and struggles to make it as an actress.

Thor

There comes a time when every great actor gets sucked into the superhero vortex. Portman got in early with the first Thor, playing Jane Foster, a no-nonsense, world-class astrophysicist who holds her own against the titular Norse god.